Social networks in online environments are increasingly relied upon by individuals to engage and participate in various types of social activities and behaviors. Individuals use online social networks to facilitate friendly, casual, romantic, business relationships and to maintain connections and initiate dialogues with others. With the prevalence of high speed network connections to the Internet and the availability of mobile devices with wireless capabilities, the online environment has become one of the dominating mechanisms through which people communicate and connect with one another.
Social networks typically allow users to search for other users for, for example, connecting with them or buying them in a game. In current searching techniques of such social networks, when two users perform a search with similar search parameters, the search result provided to them can be the same. Unfortunately, this can be a problem when both the users click to purchase the same user at the same time.
The amount of data managed in a social network is significantly huge, especially, if the number of users are in the order of hundreds of millions. In order to minimize the consumption of resources, the current social networking systems typically update the database with any new information or changes to existing information once every few minutes. Since the database is updated once every few minutes, when a user performs a search between database updates, the search result can be the same as the previous search result. That is, the search result may not obtain any new users.
Further, since the search results are spread over a number of pages, the users that are not among the users shown in the first page of the results may not be viewed by the searcher. Typically, the searcher may not navigate at all, or may not navigate to more than two or three pages. Unfortunately, such search results do not spread the interest of the searcher evenly over the search results.